Housing: Can artists offer a different perspective?

Artists and activists get together to present their work and experience on setting up collectively owned spaces, artist-led houses and documenting change in a city of disappearing houses and public spaces.

Discussions begin at 6pm, with an opportunity to view the No Going Back exhibition from 5pm.

Speakers:

• Alanna Reid (Chair), Culture Commons
• Nabil Al-Kinani, Privatise the Mandem
• Dan Sean Kelly, Two Queens
• Eva Sajovic, Artist (Elephant & Castle artist in residence) 
  
  

Speaker Bios

Alanna Reid
Alanna Reid is the Policy and Programmes Manager at Culture Commons, working on the organisation’s open policy development programmes and consultancy services. With a background in town planning and urban development, Alanna is a former policy advisor on housing and planning issues for central government, holding posts within the Department for Levelling Up, Cabinet Office and Department for Business & Trade. In addition to policy roles, Alanna was also Private Secretary and Head of Office for two Ministers of State and ran the Deputy Leader’s office & Labour Group for Edinburgh City Council.

Alanna joined Culture Commons in 2022, while pivoting their career towards the creative and cultural sectors, training in both stage and screen writing. Alanna now combines a decade of experience across policy development, parliamentary procedure and local democracy to advocate for the UK’s creative and cultural sectors, while exploring the role of storytelling and creativity in policy development.

Nabil Al-Kinani
By day, Nabil Al-Kinani is a built-environment professional with a keen interest in urbanism, placemaking, sustainable development and place vision. By night, he is a cultural producer that uses creative practice to deliver changemaking projects that draw focus on the relationship between spaces and stories. Other strands of his work includes the exploration of spatial politics, identity, culture and migration.

Daniel Sean Kelly
Daniel Sean Kelly is an artist and founding co-director of Two Queens, an artist-run, community-owned gallery and studios based in Leicester. In his work with Two Queens, Dan leads on fundraising and development, and is currently overseeing the organisation’s transition to become a Community Benefit Society, a move that seeks to build the long-term sustainability of the organisation. In addition to his work with Two Queens, Dan is an artist and Fine Art lecturer, a graduate of MA Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths and the free alternative postgraduate programme School of the Damned.

Eva Sajovic
Eva works as an artist in socially engaged art practice and a Senior Lecturer at University of the Arts London. Their work deals with colonisation of space and resource caused by gentrification, poverty, human trafficking, and climate change. Early projects included work with women in prison, Gypsy and Traveling communities, homeless people and those being displaced from the Elephant & Castle in London.

Since 2016, they have been focusing on projects that confront the climate emergency, using participatory and collaborative methodologies to move people beyond passive spectatorship towards active social agency. Their most recent work was a commission for the British Textile Biennial 2023.

They exhibit internationally and had work commissioned by Tate, Whitechapel Gallery, The National Archives, the Bauhaus, Ffotogallery, the British Textile Biennial, CREATE London, Cuming museum, In-Situ Pendle, 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, 47/04, Photography Archive Research Centre, Siobhan Davies Dance; and supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Heritage Lottery Fund, Arts Council England, Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Guerilla Foundation, the European Commission, Darat Al Funun Foundation, University of The Arts and the Ministry of Culture Slovenia.